The computer knew the details, the precise targets Roark had programmed onto the schematic. She had only to think the command at the precise time, a command that boiled down to kill.
A trio of small missiles leaped ahead, their tiny drives destroying themselves to produce a brief acceleration of space-distorting intensity and a velocity that was a significant fraction of light's. Only then did Katy let an extraneous thought enter her mind: the dying face of Ada Rivera. She sent that thought out with the missiles, on wings of vengeance.
A defensive laser managed to catch one of those missiles, blasting it off course. The deflection shields sent another veering away. But the third impacted at the precise ninety-degree angle at which the shields were useless.
The warhead was small, and vacuum does not transmit shock waves. But this was, in effect, a contact nuclear explosion.
In Katy's fading vision, the oncoming Krondathu vanished in a universe-filling fireball that blew out the visual pickups and left her in darkness before her eyesight could be permanently destroyed.
Then the expanding wave front of gas, dust and occasional chunks of debris reached the fighter, sending it into a mad tumble and flinging its occupants about with a violence that was beyond the crash couches' ability to protect them. Katy's consciousness mercifully fled. Roark's was already gone.
Curving metal segments slid up from the deck and down from the overhead and clamped together, enclosing the two badly damaged humans in escape pods which the dying fighter ejected into space as its final act.
Those pods' homing beacons were still feebly broadcasting, and their lifesystems still barely func- tioning, when the Harathon picket finally found them. The search would have long since been terminated, save that a certain very high Hov-Korth executive would not permit it.
EPILOGUE.
Svyatog'Korth had been to Earth a number of times over the years, but this was his first visit in a while-he wasn't getting any younger, and he no longer traveled as much on hovah business. And even in his salad days he'd never seen this particular part of the planet, unless one counted the virtual tours of it that he'd always enjoyed so much.
But that had been before the Cheyenne Mountain strike. For a long time thereafter he'd shied away from viewing that which his species-to which the Rogovon did, after all, belong-had wrought. But by now this part of North America had recovered, and the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies shone in the sun over lower slopes clothed in pine forests over which hawks circled, seemingly undisturbed by his air-car. He had been honest when he'd given his evaluation of the strike's ecological impact to the pair he was now going to visit. Besides, this region-Colorado was the name of the political subdivision-wasn't in the immediate neighborhood of the stricken area.
A stunning valley opened out below the air-car, reigned over by a lordly peak and graced by a gleaming upland lake, while in the distance a town could be glimpsed. His implanted data-retrieval resources spoke of Maroon Bells/Snowmass Wilderness Area and Aspen. The air-car left them behind and began to lose altitude as it approached its destination.
Svyatog, with little to do in the way of piloting the craft, continued to examine his memories. Yes, this hemisphere was in autumn then, too-thirty-seven autumns ago, when it all began. But that had been a very different autumn, on this continent's eastern edge, where the leaves turned fire-colored as they died. Here, the trees that had given their name to the town wore soft gold raiment.
There were many of those trees clustered at the feet of the mountain he was approaching, with snow-dusted pines above them, and rough-hewn crags piled above those. It was the kind of mountain Harath-Asor hadn't known since aeons before it had felt its first Lokaron foot. But this is a younger world, Svyatog reminded himself. The air-car descended onto one of the aspen-clothed lower slopes where a low, rambling house, built of native stone and timber, seemed a natural and proper part of the landscape.
Svyatog emerged, pulling his old-fashioned sleeveless robe more tightly around himself against the brisk air. He'd barely started up the graveled walkway when two humans emerged from the house- first the female and then, a little more slowly, the transmitter. No, Svyatog corrected himself, the primary male. . . . No, simply the male! Must remember that.
"Svyatog!" Katy Doyle-Roark's voice, at least, hadn't changed much. Otherwise . . . well, he knew how to read the signs of aging in humans. She wasn't showing them nearly as much as her parents had at her age, before the new biotechnology had been widely available on this world. But she had already been past her youth when she first had access to those techniques, and Svyatog could read the tale of gray hair and wrinkled skin. The same was even more true of Ben Roark; he was (Svyatog doggedly did the mental arithmetic without cybernetic assistance) seventy-nine local years old, a greater age than the average member of his species had once expected to attain. His hair was grayer than Katy's, and he'd lost most of it . . . rather an improvement, in Lokaron eyes. All things considered, he didn't look bad. His voice was still recognizable, too. "Hey," he said after the pleasantries were done, "let's get inside and have a drink! We haven't got any voleg, but I'll bet you can make do with brandy."
No, thought Svyatog, nothing has really changed. He remembered those two faces as he'd seen them-or what was left of them-in the picket craft's rudimentary little sick bay. Lokaron technology had once repaired even worse damage to Katy's body-but it had been immediately available then.
The picket had only had emergency life-support units, and even those had required jury-rigging to accommodate humans. And the trip back to Earth had been prolonged by the need to hold the g-forces down. It was just short of a miracle that Katy had survived to reach the Enclave and its state-of-the-art medical facilities, and not at all short of one that Roark had. But they'd made it, and under the circumstances wonders had been worked. Ever since, Katy had moved almost as well as she had before; and regenerated flesh had taken hold over most of Roark's body, leaving only limited areas of the shiny smoothness that grew to cover burn tissue. Little visible trace remained of what they'd once given for the life of their world.
They entered-Svyatog dipping his head carefully at the human-proportioned doors-and seated themselves with their drinks in a cathedral-ceilinged room. Logs burned brightly in a massive stone fireplace, and wide windows overlooked distant mountains and the westering sun. They spent a moment in companionable silence, with each other and their memories.
"You know, Svyatog," Katy finally said, with the smile that age had been as powerless as the ravages of war to dim, "I've never forgiven you for having been conscious when we got back to Earth."
"That's right," Roark agreed. "You got to experience all that was going on then, while we were stuck in regrowth vats!"
"You've never forgiven me?" Svyatog hoped the translator conveyed his righteous indignation to the full. "I'm the one who was left to deal with your American politicians without your help. Believe me, I would gladly have joined you in the vats!"
"Yeah, I can imagine." The reconstruction of Roark's face had made his nasty grin even nastier, and age had improved it still further. "I understand Colleen Kinsella, in particular, was ricocheting off the walls."
"Indeed. She felt-with some justice, perhaps-that she'd been misled."
"I'll bet! After she found out Morrison was abolishing the Central Committee she'd been angling for years to get onto . . . !"
"Her old friend Drummond managed to reconcile her to the new order of things. Still, it probably didn't hurt that she was no longer in a position to make trouble. She finally found herself face-to-face with the fact that she had no real power base outside the Earth First Party-which vanished like a bad dream when Morrison declared it dissolved, because it commanded no more popular affection than any other decayed, outworn theocracy."
"A theocracy which lacked even the excuse of religion." Katy nodded. "Like the Soviet system forty-some years earlier. It sort of makes you wonder. Could the whole thing have been avoided if, back around the turn of the century, enough people had dared to disagree?"
Roark nodded emphatically. "All they had to do was stand up on their hind legs and say out loud that the emperor was butt-naked."
"I recall the fable to which you allude. It illustrates the problem. Never underestimate the strength of the herd mentality-especially when the herd in question is newly under the influence of the mass communications media, and the adherents of a single viewpoint have a stranglehold on those media."
Svyatog tactfully omitted the qualifier among your species. It was unkind . . . and, he admitted to himself, unfair. There, but for a fortuitous accident of history, go we. Odd, he reflected, how often he fell unconsciously into the cadences he'd picked up from his browsings in this world's religious literature.
"At any rate," he resumed, changing the subject, "you also missed President Morrison's next proclamation, which was his call for the formation of what was to become the Confederated Nations of Earth."
"I've never gotten over being amazed at how smoothly that went," said Katy. "It surprised all of us. In retrospect, it probably shouldn't have. After the nightmare era of totalitarian states and their wars and genocides, this world was ripe for a loose global federalism based on individual liberty. Actually, it had been for decades. The EFP was merely a rear-guard action by those unwilling to relinquish their accustomed secular religion of statism."
"There were other comparable holdouts elsewhere," Katy recalled. "Islamic militants, unrecon- structed Communists in the Russian and Chinese successor states. . . . "
"There were problems," Svyatog acknowledged. "But President Morrison was able to overcome them, even though the Cheyenne Mountain strike had left the United States less capable of enforcing its will militarily. Ironically, that may have helped by making the plan less threatening. The CNE didn't look quite as much like a disguised American empire as it once would have."
"So the Rogovon actually did some good in spite of themselves," Katy mused. She fell into a silence that neither of the others broke, as they all thought of the dead. Kinsella, now forgotten . . . Drummond, remembered fondly by some . . . the Eaglemen, so many of whom had died at the Enclave or Cheyenne Mountain . . . John Morrison, whose colossal statue on the Washington Mall gazed aloft and pointed to a distant goal.
After a while, Katy smiled and spoke again. "Anyway, Svyatog, we're glad you could come here.
We understood why you thought you weren't going to be able to. But now, with the war over-"
"Practically over," Svyatog corrected. "The peace conference is still grinding on. But there can be no doubt of the outcome, except in details. So it's no longer necessary for Gev-Harath to minimize contacts here-if, indeed, it ever was. Personally, I always thought we were going a little overboard in being scrupulous about our neutrality. But I was in the minority, and in the end Hov-Korth went along with the other hovahon. They felt that our gevah needed to overcompensate a bit, given its long- standing special relationship with Earth."
"That much is true," Roark opined. "Hov-Korth, in particular, practically underwrote the Confederated Nations' success by dealing with Earth through it. You led the way in that."
"Which is precisely why so many felt that our hovah needed to lean over backwards, as your saying has it. Hypocrisy, really. Everyone in Gev-Harath was secretly cheering for you in your war with Gev- Rogov. And the outcome left us all delighted."
"Astonished, you mean," Roark said drily.
There had been no Lokaron war over the attempted coup in the solar system. It would have been bad for business. Gev-Rogov had quietly paid reparations to the gevahon involved, and that had been that. And the now-unified human race had begun to modernize itself, now that Hov-Korth (through Svyatog) and, subsequently, all of Gev-Harath had entered into a genuine trading relationship with it.
Before many years had passed, it had begun to expand along the lines Svyatog had proposed, into Sagittarius and Lupus toward the galactic core.
Then, a decade ago, that expansion had begun to run afoul of Gev-Rogov's.
The CNE had been prepared, in the name of realpolitik, to forget what the Rogovon had once sought to do to Earth. It had proposed a parceling out of the contested planets-the kind of com- promise the various gevahon routinely made. But those were compromises among Lokaron. The idea of dealing with natives on the same basis was without precedent. Gev-Rogov hadn't even thought it worth the courtesy of a formal refusal.
Eventually, the Rogovon encroachments had grown intolerable. The CNE had declared war a year ago because the alternative was for the human race to slink, beaten, back to its home system. The resigned sighs of Gev-Harath and the other friendly gevahon had been almost audible, for it was in the nature of things that a war between Lokaron and non-Lokaron could have but one outcome.
Like many others, Svyatog was still trying to adjust his reality structure to accommodate what had happened. . . .
"Have you heard from Andrew lately?" he asked.
"Oh, yes! Just last week." At the sound of her son's name, decades slid from Katy's face, dissolved in joy. She and Roark had conceived a child in the teeth of medical advice, for her body hadn't really been all that young even before taking the damage that Lokaron bioscience had only imperfectly repaired. That one experience of childbearing had been enough to bring them around to the doctors'
viewpoint, and they hadn't repeated it. But mother and son had both lived, and they'd never regretted it. "He's the executive officer of a battlecruiser, you know. We hadn't heard from him since before the Battle of Upsilon Lupus, and we knew his ship would almost certainly be engaged. So we were worried-"
"Naturally," Svyatog commiserated.
"But unnecessarily, as it turned out," Roark grinned.
"Yes. Your fleet's losses were minimal, weren't they?" Svyatog's polite smile was a mask for complex emotions. What's the matter with me? Why should I feel ambivalent? I ought to be overjoyed for my friends. After all, they are my friends, and the CNE is an ally of Gev-Harath and a lucrative market for Hov-Korth. And I've never had any use for the Rogovon-they're enemies, and they don't even belong to my subspecies.
And yet . . . they're Lokaron! And for the first time in history, Lokaron have been defeated by natives-by an alien race, I mean.
Nor had it been mere defeat. Gev-Rogov's battle fleet had been annihilated at Upsilon Lupus. The military experts were still analyzing the details of that battle, but the main outlines were clear enough.
The desperation ploy Roark and Katy had used thirty-seven years before had been the kind of trick that only works once. Knowing who they were fighting, the Rogovon had simply reprogrammed human acceleration tolerances into their targeting computers. So there had been no tactical surprises.
But the Rogovon fleet had ignored any number of elementary precautions it would have followed as a matter of course had it been going into action against real opponents-meaning Lokaron ones.
Perhaps even more importantly, the human fleet had been built from the ground up over the past decade or two, with all the Lokaron civilization's military experience to study with preconception-free eyes, and all its mistakes to learn from without embarrassment. That fleet had been crewed by the heirs of a history of total war-not just the safely remote frontier spats of the gevahon. And those crews had grown up on tales of what had almost happened to their world at the hands of Gev- Rogov. . . .
"I've heard reports," Svyatog said mildly, "that there were unexplained delays in accepting the surrender signals from some of the Rogovon ships."
"Yeah, so I understand. Well . . . " Roark took a pull on his drink and let his expression finish the sentence for him.
"Anyway," Katy piped up, a little too brightly, "the fighting's over now. Andy and all the rest of Admiral Arnstein's people will be returning home soon. All that's left now is the peace talks."
"Yes. And those shouldn't take much longer. The news from Tizath-Asor is positive." With their planetside forces in the contested region at the mercy of Arnstein's unchallenged battle fleet, the Rogovon had been left with no alternative to the unthinkable. They'd sued for peace, asking Gev- Tizath to serve as broker. So now, for the first time in history, Lokaron negotiators (Rogovon ones, at any rate, Svyatog mentally hedged) sat across a table from counterparts of another species and had terms dictated to them. The other Lokaron powers wouldn't allow those terms to be too severe.
Still . . .
Yes, he decided with bleak honesty, it may take a while before I decide just how I'm supposed to feel about this.
Outwardly, he smiled a Lokaron smile and raised his drink. "In accordance with your culture's custom, I propose a toast: to Lieutenant Commander Andrew Roark and all his brave comrades."
"Hear, hear!" Katy clinked brandy snifters with him.
"I'll drink to that." Roark hoisted the rum he'd chosen at the price of a patently ritualistic glare from his wife.
Now she glared again, with just as little conviction. "You'll drink to anything!" And the last of whatever undercurrents the room had held dissipated in the general laughter.
"Hey, I'm starving!" protested Roark. "Svyatog, we've stocked up on some items you like-or, at least, that you sell to the other Lokaron."
"That's right," Katy affirmed. "And you can stay the night, can't you? I'm sure you've been here long enough, this trip, to adapt to Earth's diurnal cycle. And we've got a state-of-the-art reconfigurable guest bed that can adapt to you." "Certainly. But I must get an early start in the morning. My shuttle departs from Front Range Spaceport before noon."
They went in to dinner as the setting sun vanished behind the Rockies. The rest of the evening passed in a convivial exchange of shared memories, in the warmth of flaming logs and the glow of good booze. And the bed they offered him was everything Katy had said it was. He couldn't blame that for the fitfulness of his sleep.
The next morning, all was pleasantries as they bade him farewell. But after he'd gotten into his air- car and was preparing for departure, Roark stepped forward. His eyes held ghosts of what had briefly passed between them the previous night, and he spoke with unwonted seriousness-almost with urgency.
"Svyatog, I want you to remember something. Aside from all you've done for us personally, the human race will always owe Gev-Harath one. We'll never forget that. Whatever happens, whatever the future holds, there'll always be that special relationship you spoke of." And then the canopy closed between them. The air-car lifted, and the two alien figures dwindled in the distance.
Svyatog set in a southeasterly course, and the canopy automatically polarized against the rising sun ahead. He marveled as always at the dramatic quality of this landscape: the rough-hewn, almost brutal quality of the raw stone that thrust upward in titanic masses. But there's been no time for wind and rain to wear those masses down, smoothing and rounding them into what I remember from Harath- Asor, he reminded himself. This is a far younger world.
For some obscure reason, the thought made him recall Roark's last, uncharacteristic words.
Whatever did he mean? He was so very earnest. It was almost as though he thought I needed reassurance. Could it have been what we were saying last night?
Of course not! he chided himself. He'd dismissed his misgivings during the night, attributing them to the unaccustomed setting and its subliminal psychological effects. Preposterous! Remember, we're talking about Gev-Rogov-technologically rather backward, socially archaic. Oh, all right: they are, I suppose, Lokaron. But they were ineptly led and stupidly overconfident, blundering along as usual under their inflexible centralized system. It's not as though this had happened to one of the mainstream Lokaron polities.
No. Of course not. What I did, years ago, was merely a move in the established, familiar game of Lokaron power politics. Nothing has really changed.
Has it?
He flew on into the morning.
BAEN BOOKS by STEVE WHITE.
The Disinherited Legacy Debt of Ages
Prince of Sunset Emperor of Dawn
Eagle Against the Stars
The Starfire series (with David Weber) Insurrection Crusade In Death Ground